Do you know how to measure success in your campaigns?

Do you know how your marketing activity impacts the businesses bottom line?

Some common questions you might hear when colleagues want to know how well you’re doing:

How many likes does your Facebook page have?

How many comments did that last post get?

Have we gotten more views on that video?

These are all common questions, I hear all the time, from enthusiastic colleagues, and entrepreneurs, eager to know how their social media is doing, blind to the fact that most of the time, none of those numbers really matter.

When it comes to social media marketing, it can be so easy to get pulled into conversations about meaningless metrics (sometimes referred to as ‘vanity metrics’) depending on what you’ve heard from a friend, or what you think should be happening.

The truth is, with digital marketing, we have the unprecedented opportunity to be able to measure and track every stage of the journey that a client or customer might travel along, when building a relationship with us, or getting to know our products and services.

The number of fans on your page really doesn’t matter at all. If you have 100 fans, and only 1 loyal customer/advocate, who regularly provides you with repeat business, and engages with your content on a regular basis when posting on Facebook, serve that loyal customer.

I have seen it on occasion, where a brand can spend tens of thousands of pounds building up a fan page with millions of likes, but then some of the posts on their page have maybe 5 likes, or 1 or 2 comments, if that. I won’t point any fingers directly, but I’ve seen it happen often enough to tell me that it’s a common enough misconception in the world of Digital Marketing with large national, and global brands, as much as it is for the local small business.

So if we want to monitor the right metrics and know how effective our marketing is, what do we need to measure?

Well, as harsh and as stark as it is – the real numbers that truly matter are sales. Direct or indirect, if you’re not generating income, or reducing the costs to your business through your marketing efforts, then it’s a harsh reality, but you’re just spending money for the sake of it. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been in positions, and seen in businesses where it makes sense to use the money up, and try stuff out. But if you’re not measuring, or actively tracking the impact of what you do, you’re as good as throwing your money down the drain.

Which is why, you should

always, always, always start with the end goal in mind.

On a practical level there’s only so many actual outcomes you can expect from your efforts.

These are:

To make sales

Reduce customer churn

Increase retention period

Increase customer satisfaction

Increase the lifetime value of a customer

Reduce your customer acquisition costs

Providing customer support, would fall under reducing customer churn. (Feel free to comment below if you think there’s any other meaningful metrics or measures of success that should be included in this list, or if you disagree – like everything else in life, I believe in constantly striving to improve, or make things better, and welcome any and all feedback).

Of all these making sales, is the most critical.

It directly impacts the lifeblood of your business (as it relates directly to bringing money and a fresh regular supply of it into your business). As long as you can see how to consistently make sales in your business, and how the marketing efforts you make can support it, then you’re golden.

If you can’t track, measure or attribute your activity to one of the above, and you’re not making regular sales in your business, then focus on making regular sales in your business first.

Without a regular income into your business, your business will not survive.

Now if you’re launching a brand new business, and you’re still developing your marketing proposition, and finding your product/market fit, then it’s a whole different story.

Use your marketing to test your products and your proposition before going to the effort of building out a business around a product/offering. (But we’ll save that for another day).

Where you already have a going concern, your number one priority should be to put all your efforts into generating regular cash flow, through the consistent production of sales.

As sales start to become a consistent and measurable outcome, then worry about the other metrics.

Of course, if you’re in a large enough business, then you may only need to focus on the area of the pie that matters to you and your department. But then make sure you know how your part of the puzzle works, and connects with the whole.

You can use tracking, and analytics tools and platforms to measure every click to your website, see every optin, conversion, and even every sale coming in.

But if you measure the wrong metrics, you will never be able to track your progress, and you’ll end up spending time and money pursuing numbers and results that ultimately don’t result in anything meaningful.

Of course if you’ve got a clear path to conversion, or you’re at a stage of figuring things out organically, and going one step at a time you might choose to focus on what you can see, rather than what you can’t.

But always know that ultimately what gets measured can be improved.

And if you measure how many people comment or like your post, but you don’t actively measure your sales, or conversions, then you’ll never see where the activity helped, and end up right back where old school marketing thrived.

Just like John Wanamaker, you’ll know that at least half the money you spend on advertising is wasted, you just won’t know which half.

]]>http://consciouscomms.co.uk/are-you-measuring-the-right-marketing-metrics/feed/0313http://consciouscomms.co.uk/are-you-measuring-the-right-marketing-metrics/How often should you be posting on Social Media?http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ConsciousComms/~3/h21DHdZcfSQ/
http://consciouscomms.co.uk/how-often-should-you-be-posting-on-social-media/#respondFri, 28 Aug 2015 10:42:10 +0000http://consciouscomms.co.uk/?p=303Buffer

Have you ever wondered what is the “optimum frequency” that you should be posting on social media with?

The honest answer is, it depends.

The most important criteria, should be based on your business objectives, as well as the availability of content, coupled with the time it takes to produce, and deliver the content out through your social channels in an appropriate format.

So if you don’t have enough stories to share, or content that would genuinely be of value to your audience, then as a default, don’t try to come up with stuff just because you feel you should. Every word, every image, every bit and byte that gets posted has to add value, and if it doesn’t then scrap it. It’s better to go silent, than to add to the noise.

As it stands, there’s far too much content being produced daily on the internet for any human on the planet to consume it all, so get off your high horse, let down your ego gently, and just accept, that your content’s value, and contribution needs to be the number one priority, ahead of how often, and how frequently you should be posting.

Rule #1

If you don’t have something useful, valuable, helpful, or beneficial to your audience, then don’t post for the sake of posting.

It’s why platforms like Facebook and Twitter penalise brands for posting on social with content that gets low engagement rates. A part of it is to do with there being too much content on the platforms to consume for the average user. But the other part is that poor quantity will damage your reputation with your audience on the platform, and end up costing you more in the long run to get back the attention of the fans that you worked so hard to acquire in the first place.

There are, on the flip side, plenty of bits of research and evidence that demonstrate that having a regular and consistent posting schedule generates consistent gains and benefits to a brand, or an individual. I’d suggest taking some of it with a pinch of salt. There’s been experiments, with Twitter for example, that show a direct correlation between frequency of posting, and growth in following.

There is definitely a basic effect. If you post more often, then you’ll get more exposure to your audience, which will lead to them potentially liking/sharing or responding more often. The key is to get your audience responding on a regular and frequent basis. That’s a lot easier, when you post regularly, and to a schedule. It also gives you a bit more structure too with which to work.

Rule #2

Post to a consistent schedule. Your audience will get conditioned into seeing your posts at the same time/day each week.

That helps in cultivating a regularity and frequency that your audience can respond to, and also structures your work, by giving you clear deadlines, and a schedule to work with.

Let’s be clear though, if you don’t have something useful, or valuable to contribute, then you are going to struggle with a schedule, especially if you’re short on content. That’s where it’s important to make sure you think of your users needs, ahead of your own. It’s helpful to know who your perfect audience is, and what they like/dislike. The better you know your audience, the easier it becomes to make sure your content will be fit for purpose.

Rule #3

Know who your perfect audience is, and keep them in mind, when preparing your content calendar.

As you start to serve your audience better, you’ll get much more of a positive reception, both through social, as well as through other mediums. Intuitively, you’ll start to develop a better sense of what works, and what doesn’t work. However, intuition can be misleading, and with a large enough audience, a single post, taken out of context can introduce in bias into what everyone thinks works, or doesn’t work for your audience.

To eliminate bias, and objectively look at how you’re meeting the needs of your audience, it’s important to look at hard stats.

The numbers don’t lie. Engagement levels, or response rates, will tell you clearly what it is that you’re accomplishing with your efforts.

Of course, you should already have a clear idea of your objectives, and measures of success for social, but if you don’t regularly measure, and report those, you won’t get the insights, or feedback you need to see what needs work, and what’s performing well.

Rule #4

Measure the performance of your social content regularly and often.

You’ll find with time, once you’ve established a baseline of performance, that you’ll now have an objective basis from which to adjust, and make changes to your posting schedule, as well as to the types of content that you post, and how well it performs for your audience.

This brings me to next rule of posting frequency:

Rule #5

Promote your audience and your peers, more than yourself.

When it comes to giving compliments, everyone loves receiving them.

If you start to actively share the content from others, from your audience, from the brands and celebrities who you would be happy to endorse, or acknowledge and from peers in your industry, or colleagues in other organisations, it speaks volumes about you.

The fact that you’re willing to provide your audience with the best content for them, regardless of where it comes from, means that you’re more interested in giving them things that you believe would be of value to them, more than just promoting yourself, and bigging yourself up on Social.

It’s a humble one, but it’s one that pays dividends. The research, in general, shows, that the more often you share things about others, and not just yourself, the more people trust, and respect you. Especially if as a voice in your field, you’re able to have an opinion on someone else’s perspective, that adds value to what you share, rather than just blanket passing on someone else’s content.

The next point, and this is a super important one is:

Rule #6

Post when your audience are online.

This might seem like a bit of a foolish bit of advice, but hear me out.

If your audience are people that go to work, then chances are they’ll be busy during office hours. So you need to think about that, and bear that in mind, when you publish your posts. Will the people you want to have see your posts be online at the time your post goes live?

The reason why it’s important, is because if they’re not going to be online when you post it, then chances are that no-one’s going to see it.

Most people don’t go and personally review everything that a brand posts. (Unless they’re a competitor or a marketer, it just isn’t going to happen 9 times out of 10!) That is unless someone has explicitly engaged with the content, and responded, reacted, or engaged in a way that brings others into the conversation. But that initial stimulus, that initial spurt of activity can only occur if the people you want to reach are likely to be checking their social networks then.

Typical times include commuting times, lunch times, evenings when sat in front of the TV. Just bear timing in mind, and look at people from your key audience segments, and see what their online habits are, before you expect success in your posting schedule.

Final bit of guidance:

Rule #7

Set your own rules.

There are no fixed rules that work for everyone.

What I’ve suggested here is an approach of how you could go about developing your posting frequency. But at the end of the day, you need to take ownership of it for yourself.

You need to define and agree upon something that is practical and that works for you.

For myself for example, I’ve deliberately refrained from posting too often on this blog, as well as my ‘brand’ social media channels for ConsciousComms, because I’ve been swamped with client work, that has kept me from wanting to be too visible, or share too much of what’s been happening.

That said, I’ve come to realise that a lot of the insights, learnings, and perspectives I’ve been picking up along the way could be super useful to colleagues, and peers in the industry, as well as people new to the field. So with that in mind, I’ve started to deliberately start a weekly posting schedule again. More to share what I have learnt, as it felt selfish not to, than for any other reason.

I’m excited whenever I post on any social channels. I know what I have to share is useful and valuable. If it’s for a client, and their audience, or for myself, and my audiences, I know, regardless, that people will benefit from the content. But I’m also really clear on where the value isn’t and unless there’s a business rationale that dictates otherwise, I always make sure I only ever post on social channels, when there’s genuine value, and a consistency of frequency involved.

If business needs change, or posting frequency needs to be revised, then I’m all for changing things along the way. However, it needs to be deliberate and conscious, with a specific intent, not just posting for the sake of posting.

I would love to hear what you think!

Do you agree with the guidance I shared?

If you do, post a comment below, on which is the most important/valuable rule for you.

If you don’t agree, I would love to hear your perspective in a reply on what you disagree with and why?

Finally if I’ve missed something out, or you think there’s something else that you would add, then please do share, your thoughts of what that might be, in the comments section below.

I look forward to connecting again soon, and leave your responses below, with your feedback!

Thanks for reading, and for sharing the article with anyone you think might benefit from the advice.

Or why you should never base your entire business around any one social network or platform that you don’t control or own.

Social Networks are great.

Thanks to platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+, we’ve now got unprecedented levels of access into people’s personal and private lives.

As a consequence, whilst they’re busy staying plugged in and connected with the people they know and care about, we get to join them at that treasured level of intimacy, and can use our own posts, and updates, to be a part of that world.

Unfortunately, whilst that’s great in ‘principle’, in practice, that priviledge can be taken away from you at any time, for any reason, and you can be left completely powerless when it happens.

In it’s early days Twitter would disappear at times, because it was being overloaded by too much data.

Users would often dread the ‘fail whale’, which would happen often, and at the time, completely isolated users from each other who had come to rely upon the platform for their daily kinship.

Even now, if you post updates too frequently, or your tools are not configured properly you can end up in ‘Twitter Jail’ so to speak, and be left without the ability to post an update from an account for an entire hour, or longer, depending on the problem and where it lies.

Facebook is notoriously bad for taking down fan pages, with no reason, or excuse being provided to the page owner, and no reasonable course of action, for the page owner.

As much as we’d like to think all that hard work, and effort will pay off, it’s important to build a ‘direct’ relationship with your fans/community/audience as soon as possible, as you never know when the plug will be pulled, and then all that hard work will be for nothing.

As a rule of thumb, you should always think of your social media profiles as part of your ‘list building’ strategy, of potential customers, as well as of your existing customers. However, like all good ‘list building’ strategies, try to get a ‘commitment’ or an exchange, as early on in the relationship as possible, so at least you can still connect with those people, even if the platform goes down, or the Fan page gets suspended.

Regular offers through exclusive newsletters, contests, promotions, or special gifts, that can only be downloaded, or viewed after handing over an email address promoted through your social channels, means that you can start collecting email addresses, and add another line of communication with your audience.

This way, even if your social channel of communication disappears, or becomes unavailable, you can always improvise, and come up with an alternative tool/platform.

Most importantly, you won’t lose all that value, and relationship that you’ve built up with a fan, just because you’re no longer in their Facebook stream, or they choose to unfollow you on Twitter.

As a brand, or a business, it’s all about building a lifelong relationship with your customers, but if you can’t find your way back to them, then you’ll have a very hard time keeping those relationships alive.

]]>http://consciouscomms.co.uk/always-have-a-plan-b-with-social-media/feed/0275http://consciouscomms.co.uk/always-have-a-plan-b-with-social-media/An Introduction to Social Media for Small Business Ownershttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ConsciousComms/~3/e2ZU3HCJbf0/
http://consciouscomms.co.uk/an-introduction-to-social-media-for-small-business-owners/#respondFri, 28 Sep 2012 22:04:43 +0000http://consciouscomms.co.uk/?p=265Buffer

Following a chat with Julia McDaid, of The Results Factory, it occurred to me, that there’s many many people out there that I keep bumping into, or meeting, who are still relatively new to the world of Social Media, from a marketing perspective.

Over the last few months, I’ve frequently had chats, that have turned into social media strategy sessions over a drink, or a coffee. Some of those informal discussions have even turned into elements of a training session, and a basic set of suggestions, or recommendations on how to use a particular platform, or a tool.

So, now I’m starting to wonder if there’s generally any interest out there in webinars introducing people to the basics of Social Media, or an introduction to the respective platforms, with suggestions and best practices on how to use them, why to use them, and how to get the most out of them, for the time that you spend with them.

I’d also be interested in hearing if you’ve got any other needs around Social Media, whether it be help with devising a Social Media Strategy, or just figuring out where to start.

I know it can all be quite overwhelming, especially when you’re a small team, without too many people to spread the workload with, or an individual going solo; but know that there are simple, easy ways of getting started, and that with a bit of coaching/training and guidance you could completely begin to master the basics, and start seeing the returns on your investment of time, and effort.

I’ve included a Google Survey in this post. If you’d like to find out more, or are interested in learning through a training, virtually or physically, then please be sure to leave your details below, and I’ll be in touch, next month, to let you know what I’ve decided to organise, in response to the interest.

We’re living in a platform saturated, attention deprived, information overloaded, flooded stream of updates with Social Media at the moment.

Most people, genuinely have access to far too much information, and not enough time, or attention, to process all the things that they would ideally love to read/consume, absorb, and participate in, conversation wise.

The online conversation is here, and it’s depriving us of our offline existence. What was designed to bring us closer to friends and families, have now become advertising portals, to the masses. The product is ‘us’ the consumer. The individual that consumes all that information, and occasionally ‘clicks’ on an ad, or a post, not necessarily realising that this is ‘paid for’ advertising, and gradually gets led ever deeper into the abyss of consumption, and attention deprivation.

Buy this thing, it will make you feel a certain way. Eat this, drink that, wash with this, party with that. The TV, and Mass Media has infiltrated the worlds of online social networks, and most of them are obsessed with increasing clicks, and selling more stuff.

Which is a real shame, because when that balance is wrong, you just don’t get the returns on the investment (which ironically is why Facebook stock has dropped so quickly in value, after being released publicly). Facebook’s stock flotation is nothing like the Google, or Amazon experience, where once they went public, they kept going up in value. Why is that, if not because of the inherent lack of value in the offering?

People are online, for 3 core reasons. To connect with their friends, their families, and their ‘interests’. So far, most of the social platforms have only really done a good job of helping people connect with their friends and their families. Most of the first wave of social networks, have all been focussed on connecting with people you already knew, in some way, shape or form.

However, new social platforms, like Instagram, and Twitter are starting to connect around ‘interests’, more than specific ‘people’. You could claim that Facebook let’s you connect on an ‘interest’ level too, however, if we look at it’s ‘origins’, and ‘focus’ – it was ‘friends’, and then slowly, family, based on how users came onboard. Through my own personal experience, I’m less than satisfied with Facebook’s ability to provide me with an appropriately curated way of staying in the loop with my friends and family, and generally am finding ‘interests’ and brands add far too much noise, to a potentially already busy environment.

Our needs when we connect with our friends and our families are very very different to when we connect with our interests. The conversations we have with our friends, and family, are generally very personal, and intimate, compared to the types of interactions we would have with people who we share a common interest with. In general when I go online, to a social platform, if I had to choose between finding out about someone I know, and care about, and a brand, or a random group of people, I will choose the people I know personally over the strangers. It’s human nature, to tend towards what’s familiar, and known.

So with that in mind, the only time I’m going to go into the ‘unknown’ is to find out something I don’t know, about something I’m interested in knowing more about. That could be related to an interest, a hobby, a sport, or something related to my work. Something that ‘adds value’ to my experience, rather than have me be the source of the experience.

This is where brands should really be. In that ‘interest’ space. Not hanging over our shoulders trying to get access to us, when we’re talking with our nearest and dearest. Even if that is where we spend most of our time. Brands need to find us out in those communities, where we’re asking questions, that their product or service can solve.

The need for yet another tool, to connect with people we know is for the most part over. What we need now, is ways of separating our personal conversations, with our friends and family from the world of our interests, and ‘likes’. There’s only a finite amount of time that people will spend coming to a service, where they can’t do everything they want to, and in my opinion, the time is coming, when communities will start emerging where the content/information/people are so key to the value of being in them, because of their expertise in a very specific niche, vertical, or sector, that the entire community focus will be singularly on that domain.

It will allow domain expertise to start being shared, and built upon in a way that doesn’t overwhelm people with updates, when the conversations get overly active, and allows people to curate and segment their news feeds and update streams by defined interests and level of activity that needs to have developed around a particular topic or discussion before it being brought to your attention.

So keep an eye out for those interesting platforms, interactions, or conversations on topics that matter to you – because you’ll start to need a life outside of your friends and family, and when you do, you’ll probably want to have tools and platforms that connect you in a different way to the dialogue/discussions that are happening there. (and yes, Google+ does have the potential to be in that space, if they continue to grow and evolve as they have done so far..)

It seems that with all the sponsorship money that’s gone into Social Media Week, one of the key features that was missing from the main website, is the ability to be able to share ‘calendars’ or schedules with friends/other participants.

Register for Events At Social Media Week London 2012

Having buttons, that allowed you to post the event you were attending to Lanyrd, or Plancast would have solved that problem, but it seems that even just getting a calendar of all the events you’re attending wasn’t high on the list of priorities of the developers this time round..

Ironically, because certain events require registration via third party websites, I wasn’t even able to compile a list of all the events that I was attending, just by registering through the website. Instead, I need to ‘favourite’ the events I’m planning on attending, in order to be able to see a single list on the Social Media Week Website, of everything I want to attend (and as far as I can tell, there’s no simple way of pulling that content into a Google Calendar), so I just went ahead and manually added each of the events I’m planning to be at into a single calendar, which I’ve shared below.

Just one small note, for the website developers for next year, when you hit the ‘Google Calendar’ button on any event, the event that gets added uses the URL of the event as follows:

http://socialmediaweek.org/?event_id=1133

(which doesn’t work).

The correct URL needs to be

http://socialmediaweek.org/event/?event_id=1133

(note the extra /event/ which is missing in the url that pre-populates the Google Calendar.)

It’s probably too late to fix this now, but perhaps next year, you could at least get that part working properly? Or even let us share our calendars publicly, to friends that haven’t registered on the website?

Anyways, here’s my schedule during Social Media Week London 2012 (however, bear in mind, that like with all things social, this is subject to change at a moments notice) :

I’m planning on attending a few events each day, and this year, I’ll do my best to blog about the different talks I attend each day. (Rather than live tweeting out of all the sessions, as I usually try to do :)

Partly because it then means I don’t need to rely on or worry about the Internet connections at each of the venues, and partly that means I get to document all the pertinent and interesting points that are made during each talk, and then capture them to remember, and share.

Historically I’ve been a much more active advocate of tweeting out from the events, and sessions, but with the amount of problems I keep experiencing whenever I try to use Twitter at an event, or in a live streaming environment, I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way to use twitter in a meaningful way right now, is through the occasional tweet, not the second by second blow by blow account of what’s happening – as apparently Twitter doesn’t like that, and ends up blocking me, or stalling on me whenever I do that!!

Look forward to seeing many of you at various events around town, over the next week!

Usually, when it comes to this time of year, I like to look into a crystal ball, and start thinking about what I think is going to be up and coming in the year to come.

Most times, those posts get stuck as drafts, and become a constant reminder of how there’s never enough time to synthesise my thinking, other times, I end up choosing not to publicly share my views, and opinions (there’s something about having your own personal take on things, which sometimes it’s nice to keep personal ;)

This year, I’ve decided to try a different approach. I want to talk to as many people as possible about what they think has been the big trends of 2011, and where they think 2012 is headed.. In the spirit of collective wisdom being smarter than any one individual, I’m curious to see what a ‘collaborative’ vision of 2012 looks like, and how 2011 looked, through the eyes of peers, and colleagues old and new..

So if you’re interested in sharing your two cents, please feel free to chime in below, in the comments, or to get in touch, if you’d be up for a short 5 minute interview. I want to get a much more granular view of the Social Landscape across Europe, for 2012, as it looks like a much more interesting tapestry of changing user behaviour, than has been in recent years past, so I’ll be reaching out to folks individually, as well as collectively, to piece together a collective vision of what 2011 was, and what 2012 could be, from the eyes of the “Social Media” Professional community.

If you want to get involved, drop me a line on farhan [at] consciouscomms [dot] co [dot] uk.

Hopefully, the effort will produce something that’s of as much value to the community as it is to me :) Here’s to a fantastic end of 2011, and a great 2012!

On the eve of the event, it’s almost a bit redundant, to talk about why you should be coming to TweetCamp, as by now you’ve almost definitely made up your mind as to whether you’re coming or not.
That said, I did want to jot down my thoughts, if only for the next time, as they’re all ripe in my mind, as I turn in for the night!

So first off, TweetCamp is an ‘un’conference.
Conferences, are usually attended purely to learn from. In an ‘un’conference, the intention is that you’ve arrived to both learn from others, as well as to teach something of value that you know. Automatically, it creates a very different dynamic, and a different experience for all.
With TweetCamp specifically, it’s not just about the learning, and sharing, it’s also about having ‘real’ conversations, with the people you know virtually.

It’s also about having that ‘deep’ relationship, that can only come out of meeting people in person, and spending the time getting to know someone. My own life experience has taught me that no matter how much you know someone, over a phone, email, or tweet, there is just infinitely more value in a face to face, that you can’t get remotely. There’s something that happens, when we meet people and we spend time with them. It’s almost as if we get super clear on why we really connect, and trust an individual, or that we really discover they’re not who they appeared to be, to us, online. (Most times we can never truly represent the full spectrum and diversity of who we are online, so it’s only in the face to face meetings that we are able to truly ‘know’ another).

Within TweetCamp, we deliberately structure part of the day, as group discussions, because we want to encourage more reflection, and thinking, than just ‘broadcasting’, and ‘talking’. We borrow some of the principles of World Cafe, to help discover what collective wisdom we have to share, but also to stretch each individual and challenge them to listen and engage with the dialogue, and discover where that may take you.

The other element that’s incorporated into TweetCamp, is the spirit of emergent learning. There is a very clear and specific intention that TweetCamp is all about learning together, and seeing what new knowledge, or insights we might discover. But most importantly, it’s about getting back into that spirit of play, and not-knowing. If we already knew the reasons why we came to TweetCamp, there’d be nothing left to discover.

That said, if the spirit of adventure, and an enquiry into what you might learn, or who you might meet isn’t of interest to you, then definitely TweetCamp isn’t for you.. But if it is, then come along, in the spirit of playfulness exploration, and I look forward to joining with you on an adventure into uncharted waters.

There’s very few good conferences I’ve been to in London, when it comes to Social Media Monitoring. One that I regularly keep an eye out for, is the conferences that Luke Brynley-Jones puts on. Primarily because of the quality of the speakers, and the diversity of perspectives that are shared throughout the day.

In the past, I’ve mainly been to conferences that have focussed on Social Media Monitoring (a key component of the Social Media Mix, especially when it comes to measuring the effectiveness of what you’ve been doing, and helping contribute toward providing an ROI on an organisations Social Media Investment).

His most recent conference, on the 19th of September, looks to be a real interesting mix, of case studies, discussions around measuring engagement, monitoring Social Media, using gaming mechanics, SEO and Social, as well as a discussion of Social Media as potentially the future for e-Commerce (you can see the full agenda here).

If you’re interested in getting a ticket, you can try your luck here, but given how packed the event gets, I wouldn’t be suprised if they’re sold out by the time you check it out.

I’ll be keeping an eye out for Peter Parkes, Head of Social Media EMEA for Expedia, who I’ve spoken with online, but never had the pleasure of meeting in person.

Andrew Grill, CEO of PeopleBrowsr UK, a Social Media Monitoring and engagement platform, (and the only place I know of where you can get 1000 days of historical Twitter data at a reasonable price). I also look forward to meeting some new people too!

Hope to see some of you there! I’m sure if the agenda is of interest, you’ll come away from the day feeling inspired/engaged and enthused about what’s working and what’s possible with Social Media.

I’ll also do my best to capture, and share info from the day. Keep an eye on my Conference Twitter channel (@conffar) for updates throughout the day (That way my regular @farhan twitter channel won’t be flooding everyone with updates throughout the day). You can also keep an eye on #smm11 for the fuller conversation from everyone who’s attending.